2008 Outstanding Directors

At first glance, Charles Denny seems an unlikely candidate to be honored for his outstanding work as a director. After all, it’s been 17 years since he retired as president and CEO of Eden Prairie–based ADC Telecommunications, Inc., and simultaneously resigned from all outside corporate directorships. Yet Denny has been anything but reticent in retirement.

“Chuck has not been stingy with his considerable skills,” says Thomas Holloran, a retired University of St. Thomas business professor and senior distinguished fellow of the Thomas Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the St. Thomas School of Law. Holloran was a member of Denny’s ADC board. “He took his talent and understanding of the corporate community and he moved it to a broader concern about society and its common welfare,” lending his experience to numerous community and nonprofit boards.

“Chuck has been a very strong business leader on the side of ethics and ethical conduct,” adds John Stout, a shareholder at Fredrickson & Byron in Minneapolis. Stout worked with Denny a few years back on a task force assigned to review corporate governance and recommend changes at HealthPartners. “In addition to being a skilled corporate executive who’s very mindful of the responsibilities an organization—its management and board—has to the shareholders and other stakeholders in the company, he’s also mindful of the bigger role these enterprises play in our society and the importance that they be ethically led.”

In fact, corporate citizenship was the topic Denny selected to research and write about as the 2007–08 Louis W. Hill, Jr., fellow in philanthropy at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. “It’s a topic I’ve been writing on forever,” Denny says. “It’s important to remember that when you’re an executive, you’re not alone. You are a citizen of your country, your state, your city, and your community. You’re a father, perhaps, and a son and a brother and a friend. You have all these relationships and roles, so you cannot make your business decisions solely on the basis of business. You have to look beyond that to the consequences . . . to those people who look to you for guidance or depend on you.”

He adds, “Hopefully, when it’s all said and done, you can look back and say, ‘Well, in my executive role the company did well.’ But it’s also important to be able to say, ‘In whatever little way I participated, the greater society in which I live has done well.’”

Denny, 77, started his professional career by traveling rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota for Home Gas Company, a business owned by his uncles.